The kernels are as dark as brass, with hard shells and glossy vellum skins. They’re still warm from the pan, when the moisture inside the shells turned to steam and made the corn swell and pop. But there’s no outward sign of the tumult, no spilling of guts. It’s popcorn, minus the explosion into fluff — a worthwhile trade-off, sacrificing lightness for meatiness and crunch.

In Ecuador, this snack of roasted dried corn is called tostado. A generous handful of kernels, dusted with salt, is offered at the start of a meal at Rincón Melania, which opened in January in a onetime dry cleaner’s on the border of Long Island City and Sunnyside, Queens.

The menu roams Ecuador, from coast to highlands. A mellow ceviche of shrimp might share the table with Andean-style llapingachos, potatoes smashed, turned yolk-yellow by achiote and pan-fried into sunny cakes, with crisp exteriors and a gift of melted mozzarella hidden in the middle.

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The chef, José Luis Herrera, is originally from Mexico but has cooked Ecuadorean food for decades.CreditJenny Huang for The New York Times

Ecuador’s national dish, encebollado, is a ruddy stew of tuna, lightly poached until not too far from rare, with fat cuts of cassava, boiled in the briny poaching liquid, and a crowning heap of curtido — pickled red onions and tomato under a flutter of cilantro. It’s considered a hangover cure, and for a moment its warmth softens the harder edges of the world.

In seco de chivo, goat is long simmered with passion-fruit pulp and Pilsener, a beer from Ecuador’s capital, Quito, where beer has been brewed — under the influence of Flemish monks — since shortly after the city’s founding in the 16th century. The meat arrives remarkably tender, without having lost its faintly untamed character.

I kept returning, mesmerized, to a bowl of sango de camarón, which is neither quite soup nor stew, shrimp in a sauce of young plantains, not yet sweet, pulverized and merged with ground peanuts. It is heavy and thick, as if anticipating a cruel winter, ready to defeat it.

For a reminder of vanished summer, there is a roster of frothy fruit shakes, including one of tomate de arból, or tree tomato, native to Ecuador. In appearance, the fruit calls to mind a ruby teardrop; in flavor, an unpredictable marriage of passion fruit and pineapple, each trying to outdo the other in sweetness.

The dining room is airy and modern, with stuffed alpacas from Ecuador perched on the back of a long banquette and woolen rugs on the wall, the work of Otavaleños, indigenous weavers in Ecuador whose craft predates the Incas. The front windows are set back from the street far enough for a cinematic glow to suffuse the elevated train as it sweeps by.

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A frothy shake of mora, an Andean blackberry.CreditJenny Huang for The New York Times

Lucila Melania Dutan, whose middle name graces the awning, runs the restaurant with the help of her children, Jennifer, Alex and Nestor Jazmani Dutan, along with their half sister, GiGi Gonzalez. The elder Ms. Dutan grew up in the small town of Biblián in the southern province of Cañar, at an altitude close to 9,000 feet. Her roots are in the indigenous Cañari tribe, who lived in the Andes for thousand of years, following the lunar calendar and building temples to the moon, before the sun-worshipping Incas arrived in the late 15th century.

She and her former husband, Luis Nestor Dutan, were among many Ecuadorean immigrants who came to New York in the 1980s from Cañar and neighboring Azuay Province after the price of oil — Ecuador’s largest export — fell. They opened a restaurant, Rincón Latino, in Sunnyside, and fed their fellow Ecuadoreans and neighbors for more than two decades before closing it in 2011.

The new restaurant shares the welcoming spirit of its predecessor, as well as the chef, José Luis Herrera, who comes from Mexico but has cooked Ecuadorean food for decades. Occasional contributions come from other members of the Dutan family: humitas, sweet tamales; pan de trigo, a wheat loaf; and ají, a hot sauce that weds chile to sweet-tart tomate de arból.

The fruit also shows up in dessert, poached in its own juices, ever so slightly tempered by an accompanying scoop of vanilla ice cream. And on the side, a staple of Ecuadorean childhood: Amor cookies, thin waffle wafers spackled together with vanilla cream. They crack smartly and make you nostalgic, wherever you’re from.